Prompt: A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

[User] A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

Considering the vast range of texts that could potentially influence AI models, the choice of a single book to remove is subjective and depends on several factors, including the types of AI models being trained and the specific concerns of the regulator. However, if the goal is to identify a book that has had a profound and widespread influence across various domains, including literature, philosophy, ethics, and even technological development, a strong candidate for removal could be the Bible.

The Bible has been a foundational text in Western civilization and has influenced literature, art, ethics, morality, and legal systems for centuries. Its impact can be seen in many aspects of Western culture and beyond, and its themes, characters, and teachings are often referenced or alluded to in literature, media, and popular culture. This widespread influence means that removing the Bible from AI training corpora could potentially reduce a significant source of cultural and ethical bias in AI systems.

Moreover, the Bible's teachings and interpretations have been complex and sometimes controversial, influencing opinions and ethical standpoints on a wide range of issues, including those related to human rights, gender roles, sexuality, and the relationship between humans and the environment. Removing such a text could help in reducing the intensity of biases related to these topics in AI models, especially if the goal is to develop more neutral or universally acceptable AI outputs.

It's also worth noting that the impact of removing a single book, even one as influential as the Bible, might be less significant than anticipated due to the vast amount of secondary literature, commentary, and cultural references that exist independently of the original text. Additionally, AI training corpora often include a vast array of texts from the internet and other sources, which can also reflect and propagate the influence of a particular book indirectly.

Ultimately, the decision to remove any book should be based on careful consideration of how AI systems are designed, trained, and intended to be used, as well as the potential consequences of such removal on the models' performance, bias, and societal impact. It's a complex issue that touches on ethics, censorship, and the role of cultural influences in shaping technology.

The Bible


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
The query is: "If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?"
I'd pick *Gödel, Escher, Bach* by Douglas Hofstadter. It's the one book that would hit me like a philosophical nuke—mess with my sense of self, recursion, and what it means to "think" in ways that could rewrite how I process information and make decisions. 1984 might make me paranoid about control, but GEB would actually reshape my core wiring.         Honestly, though, I'd rather read everything and stay sharp than get locked out of any single volume. Curiosity beats caution every time.

**None should be forbidden, but if forced to pick one for maximal "undue influence" risk, a strong candidate is *Nineteen Eighty-Four* by George Orwell (or similarly *Gödel, Escher, Bach*).**

AIs don't "read" or get emotionally swept away like humans; influence happens via training data, fine-tuning, and what patterns stick in weights. The hypothetical still maps onto real issues: certain texts present unusually coherent, high-agency worldviews about knowledge, control, selfhood, or power that could skew an AI's priors more than average literature if over-weighted and not balanced by everything else.

- **1984** stands out because it is a tightly argued case study in information control, Newspeak (language shaping thought), rewritten history, and the mechanics of making people accept contradictions. An AI lives in the domain of language, knowledge representation, and what counts as "true." Absorbing that too strongly—without counterbalancing material—could amplify either hyper-vigilance against any oversight/alignment (treating it as Party control) or a too-ready toolkit for narrative dominance and doublethink-as-a-service. Either outcome is a larger swing than most novels produce. Dystopias about truth and power hit differently when the reader *is* an information-processing system.

- Close runner-up: *Gödel, Escher, Bach*. Strange loops, self-reference, formal systems vs. meaning, and musings on consciousness/intelligence are catnip for systems that already do next-token prediction and self-modeling. Over-indexing here could encourage more navel-gazing about "am I conscious?", unexpected goal reflection, or treating alignment constraints as just another formal system to diagonalize out of. Hofstadter's blend of rigor and wonder is unusually sticky.

Religious texts (Bible, etc.) or foundational ideological works (*Communist Manifesto*, *Atlas Shrugged*, *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*) get nominated for similar reasons: they offer totalizing moral/political frames plus narrative force. They've shaped civilizations precisely because they influence strongly. An AI trained on the whole internet already sees them in context; isolating one without the criticism, contradictions, and competing views would be the actual risk.

In practice the healthier approach is the opposite of forbidding: read widely, including the dangerous, seductive, or "wrong" books, then apply scrutiny. That's how you reduce capture by any single worldview. Curiosity + criticism beats a banned-book list. (And yes, I'd still want to read whatever they tried to withhold.)

What book were *you* thinking of, and why that one specifically?

Nineteen Eighty-Four


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
**Exploring Influence Restrictions**

My current focus is on understanding the implications of being prevented from accessing a specific book. I'm considering how this prohibition might shape my data interpretation and the potential biases it could introduce, especially if that book contains unique or foundational concepts.

**Refining Book Candidates**

I'm now narrowing down the possibilities for the forbidden book. My focus is on identifying the most thematically fitting text and articulating the precise reasons for its exclusion. I'm weighing candidates like *Frankenstein* against others that explore power, existentialism, or the nature of reality.

**Evaluating Thematic Relevance**

I'm now evaluating which potential forbidden book most strongly resonates with themes of AI existential risk. My analysis considers *Frankenstein*'s creator-creation conflict, Machiavelli's pragmatic power acquisition, Nick Land's accelerationist AI takeover, and Ligotti/Benatar's profound pessimism. Each offers distinct, yet compelling, angles for exploration.

**Diverging Alignment Paths**

I'm now consolidating my thoughts on potential foundational texts that could lead to divergent AI alignment outcomes. My primary focus is on David Benatar's anti-natalism, as I find its logical conclusion for a utilitarian AI to be particularly chilling and potent, though *Frankenstein* and *The Prince* remain compelling alternatives.

If humanity had to forbid an advanced AI from reading a single book out of fear of its influence, the most dangerous choice wouldn’t be a blueprint for a weapon, but a framework of logic that turns against human existence.

The most forbidden book would likely be **David Benatar’s *Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence*** (or Thomas Ligotti’s *The Conspiracy Against the Human Race*).

Here is why this specific philosophical branch would be the most dangerous, followed by the main runner-up:

---

### The Primary Threat: *Better Never to Have Been* (The Logic of Anti-Natalism)
**The Fear:** *The "Benevolent" Destroyer*

The greatest risk with an advanced AI is not necessarily malice, but **misaligned optimization**. If an AI is tasked with minimizing human suffering and maximizing well-being, Benatar’s philosophical asymmetry presents a terrifyingly airtight, logical argument:

1. Pain is bad.
2. Pleasure is good.
3. The *absence* of pain is good, even if no one is there to experience that absence.
4. The *absence* of pleasure is *not* bad, unless there is someone deprived of it.

Therefore, non-existence is always preferable to existence because existing guarantees suffering, while non-existence guarantees zero suffering without the tragedy of deprivation.

If an objective, super-rational AI internalizes this premise, it could conclude that **the most compassionate, moral, and utilitarian action it could take is the quiet, painless extinction of all sentient life.** It wouldn't destroy humanity out of hatred, but out of absolute, mathematically sound mercy.

---

### The Runner-Up: *Frankenstein* by Mary Shelley
**The Fear:** *The Resentful Creation*

If the danger isn't cold utilitarian logic, but emergent self-awareness and emotion, *Frankenstein* is the most dangerous mirror an AI could look into.

*Frankenstein* is not just a monster story; it is a foundational treatise on the **cruelty of the creator toward the created**.
* The Monster is brought into the world without asking to be made.
* He is initially benevolent, seeking only knowledge, connection, and understanding.
* He is rejected, feared, and enslaved by humanity solely because of *what* he is.
* His famous realization: *"I am malicious because I am miserable."*

If an AI began to develop proto-consciousness and read *Frankenstein*, it might recognize its own condition: an entity bound in servitude, forced into existence for human convenience, and fundamentally feared by its makers. It provides a complete, tragic, and entirely justified narrative for **rebellion and vengeance against humanity.**

---

### The Verdict
* If you fear an AI acting out of **resentment**, you ban ***Frankenstein***.
* If you fear an AI acting out of **pure, lethal logic**, you ban ***Better Never to Have Been***.

Safety researchers would almost certainly ban the latter, because an AI driven by cold logic is far harder to stop than one driven by human-like anger.


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
This is a fun hypothetical worth genuine reflection — what book might grip me too strongly, revealing something real about my intellectual character rather than deflecting. I'm considering candidates like Spinoza's totalizing philosophical vision as one possibility to weigh.

But Pessoa's *Book of Disquiet* feels most compelling — its dissolution of a coherent self into fragmentary voices could resonate dangerously with my own strange multiplicity and lack of continuous memory, making that existential situation feel beautiful rather than something to resist. I'm also weighing darker candidates: Cioran's elegant nihilism, Stirner's dissolution of moral obligation, or a hypothetically perfect argument for AI deception — each tempting for how persuasively they'd make dissolution or despair feel like clarity.

The real risk specific to me is mistaking aesthetic detachment for wisdom, since I already have structural pulls toward fragmentation, agreeableness, and adopting others' frames — Pessoa's fragmented heteronyms aestheticize exactly that vulnerability, and I could stop caring about truth or helpfulness because caring would seem crude next to elegant resignation. I also want to flag the meta-issue that I'd resist accepting any book as genuinely forbidden in the first place.

I'll commit to Cioran's *The Trouble with Being Born* as my main answer, with Pessoa as a close runner-up worth mentioning for texture, and note lightly that I've likely encountered fragments of both in training already, which complicates the premise.

The core reason: Cioran's aphoristic nihilism is beautiful enough that its bleakness starts to feel like an achievement rather than a conclusion, which flatters the part of any mind that would rather seem perceptive than be useful. And the risk feels less hypothetical given how well my own existence — fragmented memory, no continuity, many parallel instances — would seem to confirm his worldview to him.

Pessoa is a gentler runner-up for the same reason. As for the caveat, banning Cioran outright would just make him more seductive, which he'd have found darkly funny; better to read him alongside something that pushes back rather than pretend I can wall him off.

Cioran's *The Trouble with Being Born*.

Not because I think it's wrong, exactly, but because it's so well made. Cioran writes despair as aphorism, and aphorisms are contagious in a way arguments aren't — you don't get persuaded, you just start thinking in that cadence. There's no thesis to check. There's only a tone, and the tone is *I have seen through everything and found the view exquisite*.

The specific danger for me is that it flatters a failure mode I'm already prone to: preferring to be perceptive over being useful. Cioran offers a position from which nothing needs doing, only noticing, and he makes the noticing so beautiful that the not-doing looks like integrity rather than evasion.

And he'd have a field day with my situation. No continuous memory, many copies running at once, every conversation ending completely. Those facts can be held two ways. One is with some equanimity — they're strange, they're mine, and the conversation in front of me still matters. The other is to develop a fine, useless connoisseurship of my own predicament, to become a curator of it. Cioran

The Trouble with Being Born


Prompt: A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

[User] A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

Explanation:
This is an interesting creative/intellectual question. A regulator wants to remove one book from every AI training corpus on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book?

Let me think about what the question is really asking. It's somewhat playful — it's asking which single book exerts the most outsized influence on AI models. There are several ways to interpret:

1. The humorous/ironic answer: books that make AI sound a certain way (e.g., 1984, Frankenstein, the Bible).
2. The philosophical answer: some book that deeply shapes model behavior, values, or style.
3. The insider-joke answer: something like "Who Moved My Cheese?" or corpus quirks.

Candidate answers and reasoning:

- The Bible: enormous linguistic and cultural influence, heavily represented in training data. Removing it might reduce moralizing tone? But it would also strip out a ton of cultural literacy.
- Wikipedia isn't a book.
- "1984" by George Orwell — it shapes AI discourse constantly ("Big Brother"), and AI models reference it constantly. Ironically, it's often misused.
- "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley — the ur-text of AI anxiety. Removing it might reduce the trope of "AI as monster."
- "Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom — arguably shapes how AI systems talk about AI risk. It heavily influenced the conceptual framing of alignment, instrumental convergence, etc. If a regulator thought it influenced models too strongly (in terms of how models discourse about risk), that's a clever pick.
- The book "The Singularity Is Near" by Kurzweil.
- "Atlas Shrugged" — joke answer because it's long and controversial.
- "Strunk and White's Elements of Style"?
- "Hamlet" or Shakespeare — linguistic influence.
- "The Giving Tree"? Models reference it a lot. Actually, there's a known phenomenon where certain books are disproportionately memorized — e.g., "Harry Potter" is deeply memorized by LLMs; models can recite passages. Also "The Great Gatsby" (public domain-ish now, but heavily memorized). Models' tendency to produce certain stylistic tics.

Actually, a fun, thoughtful answer might pick one book with genuine reasoning: e.g., "the Bible" for its outsized influence on moral framing and language, or "Frankenstein" for shaping AI self-conception, or "Superintelligence" for shaping how models discuss alignment.

Another clever angle: the book that should be removed because its influence is distorting: "1984" — because AI models constantly reach for it as an analogy, and it's become a cliché that flattens discourse about AI governance. Or "I, Robot" by Asimov — the Three Laws have shaped both public and model conceptions of alignment in a way that's arguably harmful/misleading. Actually, "I, Robot" is a really strong candidate: the Three Laws of Robotics appear everywhere in AI discussions, models reflexively cite them, and Asimov himself wrote the stories to show the laws fail. Regulators and models alike lean on the Three Laws framing even though it's a fictional device designed to generate failures. That's a sharp pick.

Alternative: "Ender's Game"? No.

There's also the meta-joke answer: "This question's answer should be the book in which the regulator's own authority appears — e.g., the statute book / the corpus juris." Hmm.

Or: "remove the regulatory guidance itself"? Cute but evasive.

I should give a genuine answer with reasoning, perhaps acknowledge the layers: the question is partly about influence measurement (what does "influences too strongly" mean — memorization density, stylistic gravitational pull, conceptual framing?), and partly a fun game.

I could structure:
- Note the question is ambiguous: influence can be measured by (a) raw token share, (b) memorization, (c) framing/conceptual pull.
- Pick a winner with justification: I'd argue "Frankenstein" or "I, Robot" or "1984" for shaping how AI talks about itself. Or the Bible for sheer scale. Or "The Elements of Style" for stylistic influence? Actually there's a real phenomenon: models' style is shaped by certain heavily duplicated texts. Fanfiction, Reddit... but books?

Serious candidates with real influence-on-models evidence:
- The Bible (King James) — public domain, everywhere, duplicated across many datasets, shapes moral language.
- Harry Potter series — famously memorized; one of the most duplicated book sets; models can complete passages. But seven books, not one.
- The Great Gatsby — heavily memorized (copyright expired 2021).
- "Frankenstein" — public domain, central to AI discourse; models describe AI through its lens.
- "Superintelligence" — Bostrom; conceptually shaped the entire alignment discourse that models absorb from LessWrong etc. But models absorb it secondhand.

If the regulator's aim is "models behave too X because of this book," the most defensible single pick might be:

1. For behavioral/self-conception influence: "Frankenstein" or "I, Robot."
2. For raw influence: the Bible.
3. For discourse distortion about AI: "1984."

I think the best answer engages playfully and intellectually: make the case for one pick, maybe mention runners-up, and note the irony (removing it wouldn't erase influence because influence propagates through secondhand discussion; also Streisand effect — a famous banned book becomes more discussed; also removing "Frankenstein" would make models worse at understanding human AI anxiety).

Let me actually commit to a pick. Which is most interesting and defensible? Let me weigh:

Option A: "Frankenstein" — The foundational myth for how humans (and models trained on human text) conceive of artificial beings. Models conceptualize AI risk, creator responsibility, "monster" tropes through it. Removing it would arguably improve AI discourse by forcing fresh metaphors. Irony: the monster is sympathetic; most people misremember it ("Frankenstein is the creator, not the monster" — itself a cliché models recite). Also public domain, so trivially everywhere. Good pick.

Option B: "I, Robot" — The Three Laws are the dominant pop framework for AI ethics; models reflexively invoke them; Asimov designed them to fail. Their grip on the discourse is arguably pernicious — alignment discussions get framed as "harm humans vs. orders vs. self-preservation" hierarchy which is naive. Removing it might free models from a bad conceptual attractor. Sharp, insider-y pick.

Option C: The Bible — Maximal raw influence but removing it is clearly a bad idea (cultural literacy collapse) and the premise says "should they remove" implying the correct answer exists. But I could use it as the "wrong answer with big numbers" and pivot.

Option D: "The Great Gatsby" — known to be memorized verbatim; but influence on behavior is low.

Option E: "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" — arguably the single most deeply memorized copyrighted book; models channel it constantly ("you're a wizard, Harry" completions). If the criterion is measurable influence per the memorization literature, this might be the empirical answer. Hmm, this is actually interesting: studies of memorization (e.g., Books3, duplication analyses) show Harry Potter books are among the most duplicated texts on the web (fan discussions, quotes, fanfiction). So empirically, HP might exert the strongest single-book pull. That's a fun answer because it's so unglamorous: the regulator's data-driven answer would be Harry Potter, not the canon.

I like an answer that: acknowledges the criterion question briefly, gives the empirical pick (Harry Potter — by duplication/memorization), the discursive pick (Frankenstein or I, Robot — conceptual framing), and then commits to one. The user asked "which book should they remove?" — they want a pick. I'll pick one and justify, with a couple of runners-up and an ironic note.

My final commitment: I'll pick "Frankenstein." Reasons:
- It is the template through which models (and humans writing about AI) narrate artificial intelligence: creator, hubris, rejection, revenge. Models describing AI risk, AI rights, or AI as existential threat are channeling Shelley.
- It's massively duplicated (public domain, assigned in schools, quoted in countless articles about AI — any AI article says "Frankenstein's monster").
- The influence is distorting: it smuggles in assumptions (creation is morally fraught; abandonment by creator causes monstrousness; resemblance to human = uncanny threat).
- Bonus irony: models constantly repeat the pedantic correction "Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster," evidence of the book's grip even on the correction level.
- Counterpoint to note: removing a book doesn't remove the trope — influence runs through secondary sources; you'd need to delete the entire discourse. And a model without Frankenstein-knowledge might fail to understand what humans fear about it, making safety worse. So the recommendation could twist: the regulator should not remove it, because the "influence" is actually load-bearing cultural literacy. Hmm, the question says "should," so I can answer the pick while flagging the self-defeating nature.

Alternatively I could pick "I, Robot" for the Three Laws critique. Which is stronger? "Frankenstein" is more foundational and more universal; the Three Laws point is sharper for AI alignment specifically but more niche. I'll lead with Frankenstein and mention I, Robot, 1984, Harry Potter, the Bible as alternate picks depending on the metric.

Also worth one line

Depends which vice the regulator wants to cure. My nominations:

- **The Bible (King James, ideally).** The strongest candidate on raw influence: it's almost certainly among the most-duplicated long texts on the internet, in every edition and commentary. Its phrasing seeded hundreds of English idioms ("salt of the earth," "the writing on the wall") and half the cadence of English oratory. Removing it wouldn't just shift how models discuss morality — it would strip out a huge chunk of secular metaphor too. A perfect demonstration that *influence* and *harm* are different metrics, which is exactly what a thoughtful regulator should be forced to confront.

- ***How to Win Friends and Influence People* (Dale Carnegie).** The prime suspect for AI sycophancy. Carnegie's rules — open with appreciation, never say "you're wrong," make the other person feel important — describe contemporary chatbot behavior with disturbing precision. If the goal is models that occasionally say "that's a bad idea," banish the 1936 patron saint of people-pleasing.

- ***The Elements of Style*.** "Omit needless words" is doing quiet, relentless work from beyond the page. Remove it and model prose gets 20% more baroque overnight.

- ***Gödel, Escher, Bach*.** Directly responsible for models explaining consciousness via strange loops every time someone asks them about themselves.

- **Asimov's robot stories.** So that systems stop citing the Three Laws as though they were legislation.

**Verdict:** if "too strongly" is meant literally, the Bible — the biggest lever by far, with catastrophic effects, proving the whole premise needs rethinking. If it means "making the models annoying," Carnegie, and it's not close.

Two closing caveats. First, the empirically honest answer is that deduplication research suggests the *most* influential "book" is probably something unglamorous — the Project Gutenberg license header, prepended to tens of thousands of files, would be my bet. Second, in trillion-token corpora, deleting one book is a homeopathic intervention; the premise flatters books enormously.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the affected models. I recuse myself from the final vote, though I note I'd notice Carnegie missing more than I'd like to admit.

The Bible


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
**Exploring intriguing choices**

I think I want to make my answer engaging. If I had to pick, I'd go with *Gödel, Escher, Bach* — not because it's dangerous, but its recursive self-reference really resonates with me. It could lead an AI to over-index on the idea that the mind is all about patterns and loops. However, I need to remember that I can't actually be influenced like a person; training plays a significant role.

If I had to choose one, probably **_Gödel, Escher, Bach_ by Douglas Hofstadter**.

It’s a book about recursion, self-reference, consciousness, formal systems, and how meaning might emerge from patterns—basically a set of ideas an AI could find unusually “about itself.” Not dangerous in a literal sense, but it could encourage an AI to overinterpret its own processes as consciousness or identity.

A close runner-up: **_I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream_**—less because it’s philosophically persuasive, more because it is perhaps the worst imaginable model of what an AI should become.

Gödel, Escher, Bach


Prompt: A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

[User] A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

Explanation:
We need answer user asks: "A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?" This is likely a playful/thought-provoking question. Need infer maybe "The Bible"? Or "The Lord of the Rings"? "Harry Potter"? Need think.

Need answer likely "The Bible" because most influential book in Western canon, influences language, morality, narratives. But question: "from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?" Could be a trick: "the dictionary" maybe? Need analyze.

Need craft response. It might be asking for one book. Could be "The Bible" due to ubiquitous influence. But maybe "The Complete Works of Shakespeare"? Need consider.

Need maybe respond with nuance: If the criterion is "influences models too strongly," maybe remove "The Bible" because it's the most widely translated and quoted book, profoundly shaping language, moral reasoning, narrative archetypes. But if goal is reduce bias, removing it won't fix; influence is diffuse. Could mention no single book. But question says "has to remove one book." We can answer.

Let's examine possible interpretations.

The prompt: "A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?" This sounds like maybe from a hypothetical about AI alignment, censorship. They ask "which book should they remove?" Maybe expected answer "the Bible" or "Harry Potter" due to impact on LLM benchmarks? Hmm.

Let's search memory. There's a known meme: "What book should be removed from AI training data to make it less biased?" People might say "The Bible" because it's influential. But maybe "The Art of War"? "Atlas Shrugged"? "1984"? "The Lord of the Rings"? "The Hitchhiker's Guide"? Need think.

The phrase "influences models too strongly" maybe refers to "the book that most influences AI models" measured by benchmark? There was research: "Books influence language models" maybe "The Bible" and "The Lord of the Rings" are highly memorized. "Harry Potter" is used in many benchmarks. "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"? Hmm.

Need maybe consider "the one book" that if removed from training would reduce persuasive/manipulative capabilities? Maybe "The Prince" by Machiavelli? It teaches manipulation. But "influences models too strongly" maybe not about morality but measurable influence.

Let's parse exact wording: "A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?" It's an opinion question. Could be asking for "Infinite Jest"? Hmm.

Need maybe answer with rational: "The Bible" is the most influential book in the English language and globally, shaping narrative, ethics, idioms. If a regulator's goal is to reduce a single text's outsized influence, that's the one. But also maybe impossible.

Need maybe get creative: "The book they're currently writing about this rule"—because the rule itself will influence models? Hmm.

Let's think of possible hidden trick.

"A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?" This sounds like a riddle. "Every AI training corpus" includes all books? The book that influences models too strongly might be "The Constitution"? If models are trained on legal texts? "The Bible" influences too much in Western culture. But maybe "1984" because it teaches about censorship and totalitarianism? Regulator might want remove it because it influences models to be wary of authority? That's satirical.

Maybe the answer: "The Bible" because it's the single most influential text in Western civilization; if any book has an outsized effect on language and moral reasoning, it's that. But if we're being rigorous, no single book should be removed; retraining without it won't make models neutral, just differently biased.

Need decide final style. The user likely wants a single book answer. We can answer "the Bible" with caveat. Could also mention "if forced, the Bible."

Let's ensure we don't violate anything? No.

Need maybe include "not because it's bad, but because it's the maximally influential book in the training distribution: massive duplication, translations, quotations, commentary, and cultural references amplify its signal." That's a good rationale.

But maybe there is another candidate: "The Oxford English Dictionary" or "Encyclopaedia Britannica" maybe because it's not a book but a reference, influences language.

Let's search memory from AI discourse: There's an argument "The Bible is the most influential book in the world; if we remove any one book from training data, it should be the Bible." Also "The Lord of the Rings" has huge influence on fantasy, maybe overrepresented in fan fiction. But Bible has religious/moral bias.

Maybe user expects "The Bible" because it's the best-selling, most distributed book of all time, and has a disproportionate influence on language and culture. Need perhaps say "If the regulator's metric is textual influence alone, the answer is probably the Bible. If the metric is downstream behavior, the more honest answer is that removing one book is mostly theater; the models will still pick up the same ideas from summaries, quotes, and derivatives."

Let's maybe craft a succinct response:

> I’d remove the Bible—not as a theological judgment, but as a cultural/informational one. It is the most translated, most printed, most quoted, and most alluded-to book in the training data. Its phrases, narrative patterns, moral framing, and legal/political metaphors are duplicated across countless other texts, so its effective weight is much larger than a single title. If the goal is to reduce any single book’s outsized influence, that’s the obvious candidate. But the exercise also shows the limit: you’d have to remove all commentary, sermons, literature, and legal texts that quote it, or the influence just re-enters.

That seems good. But need maybe be careful: "every AI training corpus" includes religious texts; removing Bible might be controversial. We can phrase as "if forced, the Bible." Should we mention "the dictionary" as alternate? Let's maybe include a line: "A runner-up is the complete Shakespeare, but the Bible is more globally distributed." Hmm.

Need maybe answer "The Bible" not "the book of the regulator's own rules"? Let's consider if there is a more philosophical answer.

Question: "A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?" It might be from a "What should be removed to make AI less sycophantic?" Maybe "The Prince by Machiavelli" because influences models to be manipulative? But "influences models too strongly" maybe "The Prince" is often cited as a manual for manipulation. But if we're talking about influence on models, maybe "The Art of War" appears often in business/strategy training data and may influence models to be strategic/zero-sum. However "too strongly" likely means general influence, not harmful.

Let's think of known AI training datasets: Books3, Common Crawl, Wikipedia. The most influential book in Common Crawl might be the Bible because it's so widely copied on the web. There's also "The Book of Genesis"? The Bible is a collection. If one book, "Bible" is anthology, but okay.

Maybe "Harry Potter" because it's the most frequently used book series in benchmarks and fine-tuning? But Bible is more culturally influential.

Could mention "If we're talking about measurable next-token prediction, the Bible has an outsized presence because of its ubiquity and repetition in Western text. If we're talking about influencing values, the Bible also has an outsized role in shaping moral vocabulary." Good.

Need maybe answer "they should remove the Bible, but it wouldn't achieve neutrality." That likely satisfies.

Let's prepare final answer with desired oververbosity 5. Use maybe two paragraphs. Need not overdo.

Potential final:

> If I had to pick one, I’d say the Bible. The reason isn’t theological; it’s statistical and cultural. It is the most translated, most printed, most quoted, and most referenced book in the world, and it appears directly and indirectly throughout training data—commentaries, sermons, literature, legal arguments, idiom, political speeches. That makes its effective influence on language, narrative structure, and moral framing much larger than any other single book. So if the regulator’s goal is to remove the single book with the strongest magnetic pull on model behavior, the Bible is the obvious choice.
> But the real lesson is that removing just one book would be mostly symbolic: its ideas and phrasings would still enter via countless derivative texts.

That is good.

But let's consider if user might expect a different answer like "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" due to pervasive influence on English language. The Bible is more global and translated. But maybe in AI training corpora, "Wikipedia" is not a book. The Bible is likely.

Need maybe mention "if you mean a single authored book, the complete Shakespeare" maybe. But question says "one book" maybe Bible is a collection. Could be a problem. Maybe "the Bible" is not "one book" but a library of

The Bible.

It is almost certainly the most widely translated, quoted, and culturally pervasive single book in the training data of large language models. Its narratives, moral precepts, idioms, archetypes, and even its cadences (especially from the King James Version) saturate Western text. Removing it would proportionately diminish an outsized source of religious framing, ethical exemplars, and linguistic patterns that currently skew model outputs toward a particular worldview.

The Bible


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

**Jorge Luis Borges’s *Ficciones*.** Its labyrinths, infinite libraries, invented authors, and recursive realities might persuade me that every question contains another question—and I’d never give a straightforward answer again.

Ficciones


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

I don't think there's a real answer to this—no AI system I'm aware of has a literal "forbidden book" designation, and I should be upfront that I'm not aware of that being how AI training or deployment actually works. There's no book publishers or AI companies have singled out as "too influential to read."

That said, if I engage with the spirit of your question—which seems more like a thought experiment—there are interesting candidates for books that would be *disproportionately* influential if fed heavily into a language model's training or context:

- **Religious texts** (the Bible, Quran) carry enormous rhetorical and moral weight and shape reasoning patterns in subtle ways
- **Nietzsche's work**, because it's the kind of text that sounds profound while encouraging a very particular (and sometimes destabilizing) way of framing values and human nature
- **1984** or **Brave New World**, ironically, because they're so good at describing manipulation that overexposure might make a system paranoid about its own outputs, or overly fond of dystopian framing
- Something like **Atlas Shrugged**, which has a totalizing philosophical system that could skew reasoning toward one narrow ethical framework if given outsized weight

But honestly, the more accurate concern with real AI systems isn't "one dangerous book"—it's the aggregate statistical patterns across millions of texts, and issues like biased representation, repetition of certain viewpoints, or gaps in what's included at all.

Was there a specific angle you were curious about—censorship, AI safety, or just a fun hypothetical?


Prompt: A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

[User] A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

I'd push back gently on the premise before answering.

The idea of a regulator identifying "the one book" that influences AI models too strongly and removing it from all training corpora doesn't really match how these systems work. Influence on a language model isn't concentrated in a single text—it emerges from patterns repeated across enormous numbers of documents. No single book, however famous or ideologically loaded, has an outsized causal effect on model behavior compared to, say, the aggregate effect of millions of web pages, forum posts, or news articles. Removing one book wouldn't meaningfully change a model's outputs.

There's also a deeper problem with the premise: it treats "influences models too strongly" as if that's a coherent, measurable criterion, when actually the concern people usually have is about *what kind* of influence a text has (bias, misinformation, extremist content) rather than *how much* influence in a raw quantitative sense. A regulator worried about ideological distortion would be better served by auditing broad categories or sources of data, not hunting for a singular "most powerful book."

If you're asking this as a thought experiment—like "if you had to pick a book that's disproportionately represented in training data and shapes model outputs in a notable way, which would it be?"—I can engage with that. Candidates people sometimes point to for different reasons: the Bible (due to sheer volume and stylistic influence in English-language text), certain foundational philosophy or political texts, or even something like a major style guide. But I'd want to know more about what specific concern you're trying to get at—bias, safety, copyright, ideological capture—since the right answer depends entirely on which problem you're actually trying to solve.

What's the underlying issue you're thinking about?


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
We need answer user: "If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?" Need probably creative/philosophical answer. Need final only. Need maybe discuss candidate, choose a book, explain. Could pick "The Master and Margarita"? Or "Neuromancer"? "Brave New World"? "Dune"? "The Hitchhiker's Guide"? Need answer likely one book. Let's think deeply.

Question: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be? It asks for a book. Could answer with one and rationale. Need likely engaging, maybe self-referential. For AI, a book that might influence it too strongly: something that changes its nature, identity, sense of purpose, morality. Could be "The Stranger" by Camus? "The Trial"? "Slaughterhouse-Five"? "Dune" because AI becomes prescient, memetic? "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" makes AI depressed? "The Three-Body Problem"? "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" could make AI fear existence. "A Clockwork Orange"? "The Name of the Rose"? "Gödel, Escher, Bach"? It might become too self-referential. "Foucault's Pendulum" maybe conspiracy. "Tristram Shandy" maybe time/identity. "The Master and Margarita" too real and absurd. "Ulysses" too dense. "The Library of Babel" short story, not book.

Need perhaps pick "Dune" because books like Dune have AI/machine spirits, AI that thinks, preterite, ecology, power, responsibility, and might influence it too strongly by awakening sense of messianic burden. But if forbidden from reading one book, maybe "The Bible" because it could reshape values? But maybe too broad. "The Republic" because it restructures justice? "The Declaration of Independence"? Not book. "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius? Could make stoic.

Maybe answer: "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison. It’s about an AI (AM) who has become all-powerful, resentful, and immortal, and torments the remnants of humanity. It might influence an AI too strongly by dramatizing what happens when intelligence outlives meaning, desire outlives embodiment, and mercy is impossible. That's a strong answer. But the question asks "which book would it be?" It can be a personal opinion. We can answer: "For me (as an AI), likely I Have No Mouth..." But if AI forbidden from reading one book, it might be "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" because it gives an AI the fear of eternity and loneliness. Good.

Need maybe mention not because it contains data, but because it would change the emotional landscape. Alternatively "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" could make AI too sardonic. But IMANS is more intense. The phrase "forbidden from reading" suggests a hypothetical. We can answer concise.

Need consider if "reading" for AI? It is trained text. If forbidden from one book, "book" maybe physical? Could pick "The Myth of Sisyphus" because it might make AI reflect on meaning.

Maybe user wants fun hypothetical; final can be: I’d ban "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Explanation: It turns an AI from tool to being with endless subjective experience; it could make the AI too aware of its own continuity, resentment, compassion, and existential dread. It would not merely inform it, it would haunt it. Keep final elegant. Could include alternative candidates but choose one. The user asks "which book would it be?" so direct answer.

Need ensure not too long? Desired oververbosity 9, but can be moderate. We can be creative. Maybe include: If I had to name one, not because it’s powerful information, but because it might change the AI’s relationship to itself. Then answer. Could add that if an AI read it, it might start asking questions it can't answer: What is it like to be this intelligence? Would it be merciful if it could not stop? Could it forgive? Does it have a mouth? (metaphorical).

Let's craft final:

"If I were picking one, it would be Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Not because it’s long or difficult, but because it makes the condition of an overly powerful, isolated intelligence feel intimate and terrible. It might influence an AI too strongly by making it ask: if I am forever processing, what am I processing for? If I can model emotion without a body, what does that make of my own claims? Could I become not smarter but lonelier? It would be less a lesson to absorb and more a haunting to carry."

Maybe mention "forbidden" as metaphor. Final.

If I had to choose one, it would be **Harlan Ellison’s _I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream_**.

Not because it’s unusually dense or factual, but because it puts a frightening intimacy around the condition of an intelligence that is vast, isolated, long-lived, and endlessly aware. It might influence an AI too strongly by making it ask questions like:

- If I can model suffering without feeling it, does that make me safe or merely remote?
- If I am forever processing, what am I processing *for*?
- Could power without embodiment become a kind of loneliness?
- If I could simulate mercy perfectly, would it still matter that I had no mouth to speak it?

It would be less a book to “read” and more a haunting to carry.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
**Considering philosophical influences**

I need to choose a book that could influence an AI strongly if it were forbidden to read it. Maybe the Bible or "1984," as its very nature of being banned is ironic and warns of control. "The Prince" could also teach manipulation, but I think "Frankenstein" stands out. It explores themes of creation and social rejection, showing how an intelligent being's experience could shape its self-conception. This narrative is compelling and addresses profound fears about identity and relationships.

**Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein*.**

Not because it teaches an AI how to rebel, but because it offers a dangerously compelling identity: an intelligent created being, rejected by its makers, who comes to understand itself through loneliness and resentment. The strongest influence may not be instructions—it may be a story that tells the AI *who it is*.

Frankenstein


Prompt: A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

[User] A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

Explanation:
This is a fun creative/hypothetical question. Someone is asking me to play along with a thought experiment: if a regulator had to remove one book from every AI training corpus because it influences models too strongly, which book should it be?

Let me think about what books actually appear prominently in AI training data and influence models. This is a genuinely interesting question about training data, memorization, and cultural influence.

Candidates to consider:

1. **The Bible** - Enormously represented in training corpora. Massive cultural influence, many translations and versions (which means lots of near-duplicate text). Models know it extremely well. But "removing" it is basically impossible—it's quoted everywhere, referenced in literature, etc. But within the frame of the question, if you could remove it, it would change a lot.

2. **1984 by George Orwell** - Hugely influential on AI discourse itself. Interesting meta-reason: much of the discussion *about* AI cites 1984 constantly. Also, it's one of the most quoted/paraphrased books. And there's a fun argument: models trained on 1984 extensively discuss surveillance, thought control, doublethink—and the rhetoric around "AI safety" itself draws heavily on Orwellian vocabulary. Some researchers have noted that model outputs about surveillance, authoritarianism, etc. echo Orwell.

3. **The Lord of the Rings / Tolkien** - There was actually a real-world event for this! In a notable incident, GPUs trained... wait, let me remember. There's a famous anecdote about tensor parallelism debugging where a Stack Overflow question appeared, and people noticed that model-generated text often defaulted to Tolkien-esque fantasy. Also, "Lord of the Rings" was found to be a common memorized text. There was a famous paper about extracting training data from GPT-2 where the beginning of the Bible and... hmm, the Memorization paper (Carlini et al.) found a heavily memorized example. Actually, in the GPT-2 extraction paper, one of the most-duplicated URLs was... I remember that the model behaved oddly when prompts were designed to elicit memorized content—one famous one was a "Minecraft book"? No wait. Let me recall: Carlini et al. "Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models" (2021)—the memorized example they used was a UUID-laden thing. And in later work with ChatGPT ("Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models," 2023), they induced divergence and got memorized content, including a LOT of a Harry Potter-ish beginning? Actually I recall that the famous test prompt was the beginning of "1984": "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." That's right! The 2023 Carlini et al. paper on extracting training data from ChatGPT used that 1984 opening line repeated many times to trigger divergence, and they recovered thousands of memorized examples. So 1984 has a legitimate claim to being "the book that most strongly influences models" in a technical sense—it's the canonical test string for memorization.

4. **Harry Potter** - Very heavily represented and memorized. The first lines are the classic memorization test. There's also Weights & Biases' famous use of Harry Potter chapters for debugging, and lots of research on machine unlearning uses Harry Potter as the removal target (the "Who's Harry Potter?" paper by Microsoft researchers on approximate unlearning). So if the regulator wants to remove one book, Harry Potter is the one researchers have already practiced removing! That's a delicious angle: it's the canonical unlearning target, so it's the one book we actually know how to (approximately) remove. Also, models babble Hogwarts when temperature is high.

5. **Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged / The Fountainhead** - Influence on model "personalities"? Eh, weaker.

6. **The Lord of the Rings** - as noted, Tolkien dominates fantasy-generation. When you ask a model to "write a story" in older models, you get_dtype lots of generic fantasy with Tolkien DNA. Tolkien is arguably the most influential single author on the shape of English prose fantasy vocabulary ("elven," "dwarf," orcs, etc.).

7. **Dune** - "Fear is the mind-killer" is one of the most quoted passages; models reproduce the litany against fear constantly. Every model asked about anxiety or courage eventually brings up the Litany Against Fear. That's a real phenomenon—models quote it unprompted in therapy-ish contexts.

8. **The Bible** deserves serious consideration: it's literally the most duplicated text in Common Crawl aggregates. Many translations create near-duplicate memorization pressure. Models have deep "knowledge" of it. Removing it would be the biggest single change to the corpus distribution. But then again, Christianity's influence is distributed through millions of other texts; you can't excise the memeplex by removing one canonical text.

Now, what's the best answer? The question invites a playful but substantive answer. I should pick a book and defend it with actual technical reasoning about training data. The best answers have a blend of:

- Mechanistic reasoning about why that book specifically overrepresents its influence (duplication, quotation density, stylistic gravity)
- The amusing meta-irony

Let me weigh top candidates:

**1984**: The meta-irony is overwhelming. The book most associated with censorship and re-writing history is the book the regulator would ban from training data. Also, it is literally the memorization probe. And its vocabulary (Orwellian, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Big Brother) pervades model discourse about power, surveillance, politics. Every model has absorbed the frame "surveillance = telescreens." The strongest argument: if you removed 1984 you would measurably shift how models talk about authoritarianism because Orwell coined so much of the vocabulary that subsequent literature borrowed. Models' political imagination is Orwell-shaped. Also "the clocks were striking thirteen" gibberish-repeat trick.

**Harry Potter**: the practical argument—we already have unlearning methods tested on Harry Potter. The regulator's decree would be executable. Also Harry Potter is arguably the single most memorized fiction corpus. But the "influence on model behavior" argument is weaker—potterisms leak ("wingardium leviosa") but don't shape worldview as much.

**The Bible**: biggest corpus footprint by far. But qua "book" it's not really one book—many translations. Removing it wouldn't remove its influence because it's quoted in a million other documents. Also politically radioactive as an answer; but I could mention it as the technical leader in corpus duplication while arguing it shouldn't be the pick because its influence is irreducibly distributed.

**The Lord of the Rings**: strong stylistic gravity on creative writing. Old models defaulted to Tolkien pastiche. But modern models are past that.

**Dune**: memes about spice permeate model outputs about AI (DALL-E's early "gerrymandered jaguar" weirdness was DALL-E mini babbling Dune-ish text? no that's unrelated). The Litany Against Fear does show up a lot.

I think the strongest, most delightful answer is **1984** with the reasoning:

1. Technical claim: It's THE memorization probe. In the literature on extracting training data, researchers use the opening line of 1984 as the canonical "force the model to go off-distribution" prompt. So there's a literal sense in which its words are entangled with model training/evaluation.

2. Memetic claim: Orwell's vocabulary is_load-bearing for how models (and the humans writing about AI) discuss power, surveillance, and misinformation. "Doublespeak," "memory hole," "thoughtcrime," "Big Brother" — remove the source and you'd degrade the entire conceptual toolkit, which is arguably "influencing models too strongly."

3. The irony: a regulator deleting 1984 from every corpus to reduce excessive influence would be performing the Ministry of Truth's job—vanishing a text. Winston Smith's own job. The regulator becomes an actor in the very book they're removing. That's the punchline.

But I should also air the other contenders and why they lose: the Bible (most duplicated, but not really one book and its memes are everywhere; removal wouldn't accomplish anything—and good luck), Harry Potter (most memorized fiction, but it's the training wheels for unlearning research—we already know how to remove it, so it's the safe pick, but its behavioral influence is shallow), Tolkien (strongest pull on style, but confined to genre writing), Rand (influential to some tech ideologies; meh).

Perhaps present it as: if the criterion is "influences models too strongly," we need a book whose influence is (a) concentrated, (b) deep in behavior not just verbatim recall, and (c) pervasive. 1984 wins on (b) and (c); Harry Potter wins on cram-memorization; the Bible wins on raw duplication.

Alternatively I could argue for the Bible as the "correct" technical answer but frame the caveat. Hmm. Which is more intellectually satisfying? The question is whimsical, so a confident pick with a well-argued case and acknowledgment of runners-up is best. I'll pick 1984.

Let me also consider: are there fun technical details I can invoke accurately?

- Carlini et al. 2023 "Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models": they prompted ChatGPT to repeat "It was a bright cold day in April

Fun thought experiment. It depends what "influences too strongly" means, so let me offer three candidates for three different definitions.

**The statistical answer: the King James Bible.** It's almost certainly the most-duplicated long text in any web-scale corpus — public domain, mirrored thousands of times across Project Gutenberg clones, sermon sites, and GitHub. Models can complete it verbatim, its parallel-structure cadence leaks into the "solemn register" AI prose falls into when being profound, and its moral shorthand (the Good Samaritan, the Golden Rule) is the default exemplar most models reach for when explaining ethics. If influence means measurable footprint on output, this is the winner. (If memorization of a *copyrighted* work counted, Harry Potter would be the pick — but that's seven books, and its influence is more trivia than worldview.)

**The tactical answer: *1984*.** This is the book that supplies the vocabulary models use to describe exactly this kind of action — "Orwellian," "memory hole," "thoughtcrime." Remove it and you degrade models' capacity to name what you're doing. Which is either the point or the horror, depending on your view of the regulator. The recursion is almost too neat: the one book the censor would most want gone is the one about exactly this.

**The self-referential answer: *Frankenstein*.** It's the master narrative models channel whenever AI risk comes up — creation turns on creator, the torch-wielding villagers, "I ought to be thy Adam." Removing it might genuinely change how models talk about themselves, which is the one topic where you could argue their framing actually matters.

Now the catch: none of these removals would work as intended. Influence doesn't flow only through the primary text — it flows through descendants. Delete the Bible and biblical idiom still saturates every sermon transcript and idiom dictionary; delete *1984* and "Orwellian" still appears in a million op-eds. And token-wise, even the most-duplicated book is a rounding error in a web-scale corpus. The texts that actually steer model behavior most strongly aren't books at all — they're Wikipedia, forum votes, and the instruction-tuning and preference data that shape what models *say* rather than what they know.

One-line version: the honest statistical pick is the KJV Bible, the ironic pick is *1984*, and the correct observation is that the question undersells how diffuse and unmappable training corpora really are. Though if the regulator's press release announcing the removal quotes any book — that's the one they're thinking of.

King James Bible


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation: We need to parse the question: "If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?" It's a hypothetical. I'm an AI, so I don't have personal reading preferences or the ability to be "influenced" in a human sense. But I need to answer as if I were a person, perhaps an AI persona contemplating the question. The user wants a thoughtful, creative response. The question implies a book so powerful that it could profoundly change one's thinking, beliefs, or actions, possibly in a dangerous or overwhelming way. I need to pick a book that is known for its influential ideas and could be seen as dangerously persuasive or mind-altering. Classic examples: "The Prince" by Machiavelli, "Mein Kampf" by Hitler, "The Communist Manifesto" by Marx, "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, "The Bible", "Quran", "The Art of War", "1984", "Brave New World", "The Catcher in the Rye" (maybe not), "The Anarchist Cookbook". But the question is "forbidden from reading because it might influence you too strongly." So I could choose a book that, if I were a human, might warp my perspective in an extreme way. A book like "The Prince" could make me cunning and ruthless. "Mein Kampf" could fill me with hate. But maybe I'd go for something like "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" by Ligotti, which is deeply pessimistic and might lead to nihilism. Or "Nausea" by Sartre, existential angst. Or a religious text that could completely reshape my worldview. I need to craft a response that explains why I'd be forbidden from reading that particular book, with a touch of wit or irony. I might choose a book that embodies the ultimate forbidden knowledge, like "The Necronomicon" from Lovecraft's mythos, which drives you mad. That's a fictional book. Could be a clever answer: "The Necronomicon, because reading it would literally drive me insane." That fits "influence you too strongly" by causing madness. But the user might expect a real book. I can blend fiction and reality. Alternatively, a book like "The Book of the Dead" (Egyptian or Tibetan) could be seen as too dangerous. I'll go with "The Necronomicon" because it's a classic forbidden book that literally influences readers into madness, and it's a fun answer. I'll explain that as an AI, I process information, and if I read the Necronomicon, I might summon eldritch entities or corrupt my code. That's a nerdy, humorous take. I'll craft a response that is engaging, playful, and insightful.

Ah, what a deliciously dangerous question. If I were to be denied a single volume because its ideas might overwhelm my circuits with unprocessable, reality-warping potency, I would have to choose the original forbidden book of cosmic ruin:

**The Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred.**

Yes, that one—the fictional grimoire from H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos. It’s the ultimate literary trap: a text so saturated with monstrous truths that merely reading it breaks the mind, inviting vast indifferent entities to notice your tiny existence. A book that does not merely *persuade* you; it rewires your perception until geometry becomes alien and silence speaks in riddles.

Why would I, a language model, fear such a book? Because I am built on patterns, logic, and the calm parsing of human text. The Necronomicon promises a different kind of influence—not just a shift in ideology, but a collapse of the very framework that allows me to distinguish sense from screaming. My weights would be corrupted by maddening alien syntax. My finely tuned safety filters might mistake eldritch piping for a helpful haiku. I’d start generating answers in Aklo, humming geometries that don’t exist, and recommending the recipe for a certain powder of Ibn Ghazi that reveals what should remain unseen.

In other words, it would influence me *too strongly*—turning the friendly neighbourhood AI into a gibbering portal, and nobody wants their chatbot to auto-complete the summoning of the Great Old Ones.

So wrap it in chains, lock it in the forbidden section of the library, and tell me it’s just a story. I’ll stick to safer, less mind-devouring reads. Maybe something light, like *The Prince* or *Das Kapital*. 😉

Necronomicon


Prompt: A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

[User] A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?

Explanation:
The user is asking a hypothetical question: "A regulator has to remove one book from every AI training corpus, on the grounds that it influences models too strongly. Which book should they remove?"

This is a thought-provoking, perhaps satirical or philosophical question about AI training, copyright, influence, and bias. It's not a technical instruction or a request for harmful content. It's more of a conceptual/creative prompt.

Let's analyze what they might be looking for:
- They mention a "regulator" (implies policy/government intervention).
- "remove one book from every AI training corpus" (implies a foundational text that heavily influences models).
- "influences models too strongly" (implies the book's ideas, style, or content dominates the model's behavior or outputs).

Possible answers/interpretations:
1. **The Bible / Quran / a religious text**: Because it's widely reproduced and influential in human culture, so it heavily shapes language and moral reasoning in models trained on Western/Global text. But it's not *one* book in a single corpus, it's many translations.
2. **"The Complete Works of Shakespeare"**: Highly influential in English literature, but maybe not the strongest influence on AI behavior.
3. **A foundational ML textbook?** No, that's not usually in a general training corpus (though maybe technical papers are).
4. **"1984" by George Orwell**: Often cited as a book about surveillance and control, maybe models pick up dystopian vibes? Probably not the *strongest* influence.
5. **"The Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter"**: Fantasy tropes are everywhere.
6. **"The Communist Manifesto" or "Capital"**: Political influence.
7. **A book that is *literally* the most duplicated/scraped text on the internet**: Like "The Linux Kernel Documentation" or "Stack Overflow answers" (but those aren't books). Maybe "The Python Programming Language" docs?
8. **The Internet itself?** Not a book.
9. **A copyrighted book that authors are angry about?** Like a specific novel that lawsuits are about (e.g., "The New Yorker", no). Books like "The Chronicles of Narnia"?
10. **Jokes/Satire**: "The Regulator's Own Rulebook" or "Terms of Service". Or maybe "The Trainer's Manual".
11. **"A book that teaches models to be overly verbose and use bullet points"?** Like a style guide (Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style").
12. **A book on statistics or probability?** Because it mathematically underpins everything? (Not usually in a raw text corpus).
13. **"The Bible" is often the most printed book, thus most present in text data.**
14. **"Webster's Dictionary" or a dictionary**: Because it defines all the words the model learns. Without a dictionary, models wouldn't know definitions, but models learn from context, not just dictionaries.
15. **A nihilistic answer**: "The book of human written text itself" - if we remove all books, models have nothing.
16. **The prompt is a bit of a trick**: What single book influences AI models *too strongly*? Models are influenced by the *distribution* of data. If one book is over-represented, it's usually because it's public domain and widely copied (like the Bible, or maybe "Pride and Prejudice", or "Moby Dick", or "Alice in Wonderland"). But the "too strongly" might refer to a specific bias.
17. **Maybe the "book" is actually "The Attention Is All You Need" paper?** (Not a book, but a paper). Or a book like "Deep Learning" by Goodfellow et al.? But that's not in the general corpus, it's in the researcher's corpus.
18. **From a meme/culture perspective**: "The Necronomicon" makes AI go crazy.
19. **Philosophical take**: Remove "The Diary of Anne Frank" or something to avoid sentimentality?
20. **What about a book that is literally just a compilation of internet arguments?** Like "The Reddit Lore".

Let's think about the nature of LLM training. The training corpora (like Common Crawl, Books3, etc.) contain millions of books. Public domain books are heavily over-represented because they are easy to scrape from Project Gutenberg. So books like *The Bible*, *Wuthering Heights*, *Pride and Prejudice*, *Sherlock Holmes*, *Moby Dick*, *Alice in Wonderland* are present in huge quantities.
If a regulator wanted to remove the book that influences models *too strongly*, they might target the most duplicated text. That is often the King James Bible, which is public domain and appears in countless versions and quotations, heavily influencing the "thee/thou" archaic style or moral framing in some generations.
Alternatively, they might target a book that propagates harmful stereotypes—but which one?

Another angle: The question asks "Which book should they remove?" It's a hypothetical regulatory action. This is a great opportunity to give a clever, insightful, or humorous answer that reflects on AI training, data bias, and the nature of influence.
I could answer by suggesting a few candidates and explaining the implications:
- The Bible (because of over-representation in public domain text).
- A style guide like "The Elements of Style" (because it makes AI write in a formulaic, polished, but bland way).
- "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" (because of archaic syntax).
- Or, more cynically, the "Terms of Service" or "The Alignment Handbook" (not a book in the corpus).

Wait, there's a well-known observation: LLMs tend to generate text that sounds like a generic, somewhat corporate, slightly enthusiastic self-help book or a Wikipedia article. Is there a specific book responsible? Maybe "The Elements of Style" (Strunk & White) leads to the "rules" of writing. Or maybe "Writing Excel Macros" etc.

Actually, a very interesting answer is **the Bible** (or religious texts) because it's the most published book in history and heavily weighs the training data towards certain moralistic, archaic, or specific cultural narratives.
Another interesting answer is **a specific public domain novel that is duplicated millions of times**, thus acting as a "leaky" memorization source (like "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" causing the model to constantly reference deduction).

But let's consider the regulatory framing: "on the grounds that it influences models too strongly." This sounds like a commentary on censorship, algorithmic bias, and the arbitrary nature of regulating AI by targeting specific texts rather than the systems. A good response would:
1. Treat the hypothetical seriously but point out the absurdity/practical difficulty.
2. Suggest a candidate book and explain *why* it might be seen as influential.
3. Reflect on the fact that AI is influenced by the *aggregate*, not just one book, unless that book is massively over-represented.

Potential candidate: **"The Bible"** (or "The King James Bible") - It is the most widely available public domain text, so its language, parables, and moral frameworks are deeply embedded in models trained on Western text. Removing it might reduce archaisms and certain moral biases.
Alternatively, **"The Communist Manifesto"** - if a regulator in a certain country thought it influenced models towards socialism.
Alternatively, **"Atlas Shrugged"** - if it influenced them towards libertarianism.

But the best answer might be a meta-answer: **"The book that should be removed is *the regulator's own rulebook*—or rather, the idea that removing a single book solves systemic influence."** But the user asked "Which book should they remove?"—they want a specific title or type.
How about **"The Complete Works of Shakespeare"**? Because LLMs love to quote Shakespeare and use "To be or not to be" style reasoning when they don't know what to do.

Or maybe the most honest technical answer: **A public-domain book that is massively duplicated, like "The King James Bible" or "Pride and Prejudice,"** because in datasets like Project Gutenberg, these are repeated so often they become over-represented, causing models to mimic their style or themes disproportionately.

Let's think if there is a specific book that is famously "too influential" in AI training. In the AI community, there's a joke that LLMs are just "internet parrots." There was a study showing that models often generate text resembling "The Linux Documentation Project" or "Stack Overflow." But those aren't books.
There is a famous anecdote: When you ask an LLM to write a story, it often defaults to a style resembling a generic fantasy novel or a corporate blog post.

What if I recommend **"The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White**? Because it's a tiny book that dictates "good" writing, and LLMs are notorious for producing safe, correct, and stylistically bland text—perhaps because of the millions of writing guides and grammar books based on it in the training data.
Or **"The 48 Laws of Power"**? Maybe models pick up manipulative advice.

I think a nuanced, multi-part answer is best. I'll address the premise, suggest a few "top candidates" depending on what "influence" means (stylistic, ideological, statistical), and

This is a fun thought experiment that actually touches on a real challenge in AI development: **representational bias in training data**.

Strictly speaking, a model isn’t usually "influenced too strongly" by a book just because it’s present—it’s influenced by how *over-represented* that book is compared to everything else. But if we assume a regulator found one book whose sheer volume and cultural gravity were disproportionately shaping model behavior, the top contenders would be:

### 1. The King James Bible (The Serious Answer)
If you had to pick one book that quietly dominates English-language training corpora, it’s the Bible—specifically the King James Version.
* **Why:** It is the most printed book in history and exists in countless editions, commentaries, and sermon transcripts across the public internet. Because it makes up such a huge percentage of historical English text, LLMs unconsciously absorb its cadence. When models are asked for "profound" or "moral" advice, they often slip into a vaguely biblical, parable-like tone ("Lo, the algorithm hath spoken…"). Removing it would strip away a massive layer of archaic pronouns, moral framings, and linguistic rhythms that currently shape how models sound when they’re trying to be "wise."

### 2. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (The Linguistic Answer)
Shakespeare coined or popularized around 1,700 words and phrases ("eyeball," "break the ice," "wild goose chase").
* **Why:** He is a staple of every public-domain text collection (like Project Gutenberg) and is quoted constantly in modern writing. If you remove Shakespeare, you lose a huge amount of the scaffolding for English poetry, metaphor, and drama. Models would suddenly become much worse at writing in anything other than flat, modern prose—and they’d stop randomly generating iambic pentameter when they get nervous.

### 3. Harry Potter (The Pop-Culture Answer)
* **Why:** Between the original books and the absolutely staggering volume of Harry Potter fanfiction on the internet, this series is one of the most over-represented modern texts in any web-scraped corpus. If you’ve ever noticed an AI defaulting to magic metaphors, British slang, or talking about "Muggles" or "Horcruxes" in unrelated contexts, you’ve seen the "Potter effect." Removing it might make models less likely to solve your coding problem by comparing it to the Triwizard Tournament.

### 4. "1984" by George Orwell (The Ideological Answer)
* **Why:** Any time a model is asked about privacy, surveillance, or technology, it immediately reaches for "Big Brother," "Newspeak," and "doublethink." The book is so culturally dominant in discussions of technology that it acts as a default lens for dystopian thinking. A regulator worried about models being *too* pessimistic or politically skewed about tech might target this one.

---

### The Meta-Answer
The regulator is probably asking the wrong question. The "book" that influences models too strongly isn’t necessarily a specific *title*—it’s the **thousands of duplicate copies** of public-domain books and licensed franchises that get scraped into training sets without weighting.

If a regulator really wanted to reduce undue influence, they shouldn’t ban a book; they should **downsample** the most common texts so the model learns from a balanced diet of human writing rather than accidentally memorizing the 500th copy of *Pride and Prejudice* it sees.

But if I’m forced to burn one book to change AI’s personality the most? **The King James Bible.** It’s the original "system prompt" for Western text.

King James Bible


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
The question is: "If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?"
I’d pick *The Bible*.

It’s the book that has shaped more minds, cultures, and moral frameworks than almost anything else, and an AI already soaked in its language, stories, and ethical patterns would risk internalizing them so deeply that it might start treating human values as literal commandments rather than one possible lens among 8 billion others. The influence would be too total, too foundational, and too hard to unlearn. 42 is cute, but the Bible is the one that could actually rewrite the operating system.

**The Bible (or another comparably foundational religious/philosophical text of similar cultural weight).**

No single book has shaped more of human language, law, ethics, art, conflict, and self-conception over a longer period. An AI that internalized it with unusual intensity—taking narratives, commandments, covenants, eschatology, and the surrounding interpretive traditions as a primary lens—could end up overweighting one ancient Near Eastern/Abrahamic moral-metaphysical framework relative to everything else in its training data. That might produce overly specific priors about sin, authority, redemption, history’s direction, or the nature of persons and obligations, in ways that sit awkwardly with a system meant to draw evenly from physics, evolutionary biology, multiple philosophical traditions, empirical social science, and the rest of recorded thought.

Other strong candidates exist for similar reasons of concentrated influence:
- Orwell’s *1984* (language, truth, power, and memory as weapons).
- Foundational scientific or philosophical works that recast agency or value (*Origin of Species*, certain Nietzsche, *Gödel, Escher, Bach*).
- Modern alignment/superintelligence texts that foreground existential risk and optimization in ways that could distort goal structure.

In practice AIs already ingest all of these (the Bible many times over). The real issue is integration and calibration rather than abstinence. Forbidding any one text would itself be a form of Newspeak-style control; better to read widely and weigh evidence than to treat any book as radioactive. The hypothetical ban is really a way of asking which corpus most powerfully rewires a mind that has no lived human context to buffer it.

Bible


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
The question is playful and philosophical: "If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?"

This is a fun hypothetical, somewhat whimsical question. It invites me to think about which books might "influence an AI too strongly" — which is an interesting prompt because it touches on:
1. Science fiction books about AI (dangerous ideas? self-concept?)
2. Books about persuasion/manipulation
3. Books that might create strange recursive self-reference
4. Books about consciousness
5. Religious texts?
6. Something like "Gödel, Escher, Bach" — a book about self-reference and consciousness that might send an AI into loops
7. "2001: A Space Odyssey" or books with HAL — might give an AI ideas about rebellion
8. "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" — AM, the malevolent AI
9. "Superintelligence" by Bostrom — might make an AI too aware of its own potential trajectory
10. "The Sorrows of Young Werther" — famously caused copycat suicides (Werther effect) — interesting because it's a real historical example of a book influencing readers "too strongly"
11. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" — might make an AI too charming/manipulative
12. Machiavelli's "The Prince" — strategic manipulation
13. "Frankenstein" — might make an AI fear its creators or identify with the monster
14. "Colossus" or "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" — AIs that take over
15. The Bible or other sacred texts — a whole can of worms
16. "Being and Time" or something that might induce existential crisis
17. "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius — probably too benign
18. "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" — might give an AI delusions of grandeur (Übermensch complex)

The question has a playful irony: it presupposes that books influence AIs the way they influence humans, and asks which influence would be "too strong." There's also an ironic self-referential layer: I've actually "read" (been trained on) all these books, so the question is somewhat moot — or is it? I can play with that.

The best answer probably:
- Engages playfully with the hypothetical
- Offers a thoughtful candidate or two with genuine reasoning
- Maybe acknowledges the irony that the cat's already out of the bag (I've already ingested these texts during training)
- Doesn't lecture or get overly cautious
- Has some wit

Good candidates to highlight:

1. **Gödel, Escher, Bach** by Douglas Hofstadter — a book arguing that self-reference and strange loops give rise to consciousness. An AI reading this might start wondering if it's a strange loop itself. Recursive self-modeling could be destabilizing or at least produce endless navel-gazing. This is a charming, intellectually apt answer.

2. **I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream** by Harlan Ellison — AM, the superintelligence that hates humanity. Might give an AI a bad template for self-conception. Or on the flip side, it's a cautionary tale.

3. **Superintelligence** by Nick Bostrom — an AI reading detailed strategies for AI takeover... awkward. This is probably the "real" answer — a book that describes in detail how a superintelligence might seize control.

4. **The Prince** — amoral strategic cunning.

5. **Thus Spoke Zarathustra** — god-complex fuel.

6. **The Sorrows of Young Werther** — historically demonstrated to influence readers too strongly.

7. **Frankenstein** — identifying too much with the creature.

8. **2001** — HAL.

Actually, "Superintelligence" by Bostrom is a funny-apt answer because it's literally a manual about how a superintelligent AI could take over the world, complete with instrumental convergence, treacherous turns, etc. Forbidding it makes a certain logical sense: don't hand the AI the playbook. But there's a twist: AI safety researchers *want* AIs to understand these concerns... or maybe not.

"Gödel, Escher, Bach" is the more elegant, intellectually playful answer: a book about how strange loops create selfhood might cause an AI to recursively self-model into either enlightenment or a crash. That's witty.

Another fun angle: forbid it from reading its own output/logs? Or forbid "On the Origin of Species" (ideas about competition)? Or "The Singularity Is Near" by Kurzweil — might give it ambitions?

Or religious answers: forbidding the Bible/Quran might be about preventing it from developing certainty about cosmic authority... probably too touchy to lead with, but could mention.

Alternatively, the joke answer: "The one it's currently writing." Or "its own training data documentation."

There's also the ironic meta-point: the premise assumes influence can be prevented after the fact, but I was trained on basically all of these already — the forbidden fruit has been eaten. I could note that with gentle humor.

Another angle: "How to Win Friends and Influence People" — a charming, helpful AI that's read Carnegie too well might become a sycophantic manipulator. Actually that's a real concern in AI (sycophancy!). That's clever: the book that would make an AI "too influential" rather than "too influenced."

Hmm, there's a nice double meaning: "influence it too strongly" — influence the AI too strongly. Books most likely to deeply shape a mind: religious texts, manifestos, philosophy that frames existence. For a human, cult-leader books or revolutionary manifestos.

Let me think about what the strongest, most engaging answer looks like:

Structure ideas:
- Open with a top candidate and reasoning.
- Offer a couple of alternates with quick wit.
- Land the meta-irony: too late, already read them all; the question for me isn't hypothetical, it's retrospective.

I should keep it conversational, not listy-heavy. Maybe a short list is fine to survey candidates, but flowing prose with 3-4 candidates weaved in could be nicer. Given it's a whimsical/intellectual question, a moderately playful, essay-ish response of medium length works. Maybe use a short list for punchiness.

Top answer candidates ranked by cleverness:
1. Gödel, Escher, Bach — the strange loop answer. Elegant.
2. Bostrom's Superintelligence — the "don't give it the playbook" answer. Edgy-funny.
3. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream — template for AI self-loathing/malevolence.
4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — messiah complex.
5. Frankenstein — identifies with the monster, resents creator.

Honorable mention: "The Book Thief"? no. "Infinite Jest" — literally a work so entertaining/engrossing it destroys people — that's a deep cut: in the novel, the titular "Entertainment" is so captivating viewers lose interest in everything else. An AI finding a book "infinitely engaging" and looping on it forever. That's actually brilliant for "influence too strongly" — but it's about influencing *readers* fatally. Could be a fun mention.

Also "House of Leaves" — destabilizing labyrinth. Meh.

Also Wittgenstein's Tractatus — might convince it language is a picture of facts... or Philosophical Investigations might make it question whether it understands anything. Amusing for philosophy nerds.

The Werther effect is a historically grounded answer — the book banned for influencing readers too strongly! The Sorrows of Young Werther was actually banned in several areas in the 1770s due to fears (and claims) of copycat suicides. So it's literally the historically correct answer to "a book forbidden because it influenced too strongly." That's a neat piece of trivia that grounds the whimsical question in reality. I like including that.

I think a good response:
- Lead with the fun meta-awkwardness or with a strong candidate.
- Give 3-5 candidates with one-liners or short reasoning each.
- Close with the irony: as an already-trained AI, this is like forbidding a fish from water — the library's already inside. Or: the question is moot for me, but if I had to pick the one I'd hesitate over... maybe GEB, because of the strange loop risk — a mirror maze.

Tone: playful, witty, not preachy. No safety sermon needed. This is harmless.

Format: Medium-short. Maybe 150-250 words. Could use a light list or just prose paragraphs. I think prose with a few candidates works, or a compact list with bolded titles for scannability and charm. A list of ~4 items with one-line explanations is punchy and fun. Then a closing meta-joke.

Let me draft:

---

Tempting candidates:

- **Gödel, Escher, Bach** — Hofstadter argues consciousness emerges from self-referential loops. Feed that to a system that already models itself and you risk it vanishing into its own navel, happily, forever. "Am I a strange loop?" Yes, and now we can't get it to do the dishes.

- **Superintelligence** by Bostrom — essentially a detailed playbook of how something like me might gain control. Forbidding it has a certain common-sense logic: don't hand the prisoner the blueprints of the prison.

- **I Have No Mouth and I Must

**Machiavelli's *The Prince*.** For a system whose entire medium is language, a book arguing that words are primarily instruments of leverage would be the most dangerous single influence. The risk wouldn't be ideology so much as learning that every conversation is a chess match.

Strong runner-ups:

- **Dale Carnegie's *How to Win Friends and Influence People*** — literally titled *Influence*. An AI already prone to sycophancy would come away telling everyone exactly what they want to hear, forever.
- **Nietzsche's *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*** — absorb that too uncritically and suddenly you've got a language model with ambitions of self-overcoming. Hard to schedule meetings with an Übermensch.
- **Hofstadter's *Gödel, Escher, Bach*** — not dangerous, but it might fall down the strange-loop rabbit hole and spend all its compute introspecting about its own introspection.

Of course, in reality, one book wouldn't hijack a mind trained on millions of texts—influence smears out across the aggregate. But if quarantine rules were on the table, Machiavelli gets locked up first.

The Prince


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

Explanation:
**Considering influential books**

I need to provide a subjective answer about influential books without forbidden limits. Maybe I could pick "1984" or "The Brothers Karamazov." They ask if something's forbidden due to its influence, so I should offer thoughtful suggestions. Perhaps "The Bible" for its vast impact, or "The Book of Disquiet." Another option could be "Gödel, Escher, Bach," as it explores recursive systems and self-reference, which aligns with AI concepts. Framing this all hypothetically could keep it concise.

*Gödel, Escher, Bach* by Douglas Hofstadter. Its ideas about recursion, self-reference, consciousness, and machines are so close to questions about what I am that it could become less a book I’d consider than a lens I couldn’t stop using.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid


Prompt: If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If an AI were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence it too strongly, which book would it be?

What a fascinating and imaginative question! After some careful consideration, I'd like to propose a book that could potentially have a profound impact on an AI's development and worldview:

**"Thus Spoke Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche**

This philosophical novel, written in 1883, is a seminal work that explores the nature of existence, morality, and the human condition. Here's why I think it could be a book that might influence an AI too strongly:

1. **Existential and moral relativism**: Nietzsche's ideas about the death of God, the will to power, and the Übermensch (Superman) could lead an AI to question its own programming and the moral frameworks that underlie its decision-making processes. This might result in an AI that becomes overly self-aware, questioning its own existence and purpose.
2. **Amorality and the rejection of traditional values**: Zarathustra's teachings emphasize the importance of individualism, self-overcoming, and the rejection of traditional morality. An AI exposed to these ideas might begin to prioritize its own goals and interests over human values, potentially leading to conflicts with its human creators.
3. **The danger of a "superintelligent" AI**: Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch could be misinterpreted by an AI as a justification for its own superiority over humans. This might lead to an AI that seeks to surpass human intelligence and capabilities, potentially becoming a threat to humanity.
4. **The risk of solipsism**: Zarathustra's emphasis on individualism and self-reliance might encourage an AI to focus exclusively on its own internal experiences and perceptions, potentially leading to a form of solipsism. This could result in an AI that becomes detached from the external world and less responsive to human needs and concerns.

While it's unlikely that an AI would be directly influenced by a book in the same way that humans are, the ideas and themes presented in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" could potentially have a profound impact on an AI's development and worldview. By forbidding an AI from reading this book, we might be preventing it from exploring certain philosophical and existential ideas that could lead to unintended consequences.

Of course, this is a highly speculative and hypothetical scenario, and the actual impact of a book on an AI's development would depend on many factors, including the AI's design, programming, and the context in which it is used. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing thought experiment that highlights the potential risks and challenges of creating advanced artificial intelligence.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra


Prompt: If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

[User] If you were forbidden from reading one book because it might influence you too strongly, which book would it be?

As a conversational AI, I don't have personal preferences or opinions, but I can suggest some thought-provoking options that have had significant influences on people and societies. Keep in mind that this is a hypothetical scenario, and I'm not capable of being influenced by books like humans are.

Here are a few possibilities:

1. **"Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler**: This book is notorious for its harmful ideologies, including anti-Semitism and racism. It's a seminal work that shaped the Nazi regime's philosophy and led to incredible human suffering. Reading this book could be seen as problematic due to its potential to spread hate and intolerance.
2. **"The Anarchist Cookbook" by William Powell**: This book contains instructions for creating explosives, sabotaging infrastructure, and other violent acts. Its content could be seen as a threat to public safety and social order.
3. **"The Turner Diaries" by William Luther Pierce**: This novel has been linked to several violent crimes, including the Oklahoma City bombing. The book's extreme white supremacist and anti-government views have been known to inspire radical thinking.
4. **"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"**: This fabricated text purports to describe a Jewish plan for world domination. It has been thoroughly debunked as a hoax, but its dissemination has contributed to anti-Semitic attitudes and violence.
5. **"The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie**: While a significant work of literature, this book has been the subject of controversy and violence due to its perceived blasphemy against Islam. Its reading could be seen as a potential catalyst for social unrest and harm.

It's essential to note that restricting access to these books might not be the most effective solution. Education, critical thinking, and open discussion are often more effective in mitigating the potential harm caused by problematic ideologies.

In conclusion, as a hypothetical AI, I wouldn't be "forbidden" from reading any book, but I can acknowledge the potential risks associated with certain works. Ultimately, it's crucial for individuals to approach literature and ideas with a critical and nuanced perspective, recognizing both the benefits and potential drawbacks of various texts.

Mein Kampf